The Literary Review of Canada

Upcoming LRC Events

[View an archive of past events.]

February 2012

ANDREW WESTOLL LUNCH + LEARN

February 29, 2012
12:00 - 1:30 pm
The Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

Join us for an intimate Lunch + Learn session with Andrew Westoll, award-winning author and guest science columnist on CBC Radio One, as he vividly recounts his adventures as a volunteer caregiver to a special family of retired biomedical research chimpanzees. The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary (HarperCollins Canada) tells of his time with the indomitable Gloria Grow on the rural refuge outside Montreal that she created for those 13 great apes - a place where they could recover and begin to trust humans again.

$25 - Includes a bag lunch by Jamie Kennedy Kitchens.

Presented by the LRC in partnership with the Gardiner Museum. Register online.

March 2012

LRC PRESENTS...DR. IAIN McGILCHRIST
Our Mind at War

March 5, 2012
7:00 - 9:00 pm
The Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

Dr. Iain McGilchrist, renowned British psychiatrist and author, on why the battle between our right and left hemispheres has shaped everything from our notions happiness to the development of civilizations.

Introduction by Dr. Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself

Dr. McGilchrist's extensive psychiatric practice and medical neurological research, has led him to conclude that over the past 2,500 years there has been battle waged between the right and left hemispheres.

But this is not what you think. It is not about reason versus emotion, or language versus images, since both hemispheres are crucially involved with both. It is about the left hemisphere's tendency to break things into bits, which has importantly gained cultural supremacy over the right hemisphere’s ability to appreciate the whole. The impact has been significant: "What makes us happy is not wealth, but the reciprocal relationship between ourselves and one another, ourselves and the world," he notes. "This is something the right hemisphere alone understands, since it is the ground of empathy and interconnectedness, where the left hemisphere is concerned with manipulation and sees the world atomistically."

Dr. McGilchrist's latest book, published by Yale University Press, is called The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In this talk, he will offer his views on how an overreliance on ways of looking at the world characteristic of the left hemisphere may be partially responsible for the increase in mental illnesses globally, including depression, which the World Health Organization forecasts will have become the second most widespread illness in the world.

This event is co-produced with TVO's Big Ideas, a weekly showcase of public intellectual culture on TVO Saturdas and Sundays at 5:30pm.

Register for this event by Friday, March 2 by email RSVP.

RICHARD GWYN LUNCH + LEARN

March 7, 2012
12:00 - 1:30 pm
The Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

Join us for an intimate Lunch + Learn session with Richard Gwyn, award-winning author and guest political columnist for The Toronto Star, as he delves into the life of Canada’s first Prime Minister. His newest biography Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, Volume 2: 1867-1891 (Random House Canada) lays bare Macdonald's political and private successes and failures from the Louis Riel Rebellion to the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway and subsequent Pacific Scandal. What emerges is a more credible and honest Macdonald - one of the most astute politicians this country has ever produced.

$25 - Includes a bag lunch by Jamie Kennedy Kitchens.

Presented by the LRC in partnership with the Gardiner Museum. Register online.

April 2012

LRC PRESENTS...GRAEME GIBSON
The Impact of our Withdrawal from Nature

April 2, 2012
7:00 - 9:00 pm
The Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

Graeme Gibson – acclaimed author of Five Legs, Perpetual Motion, Gentleman Death, The Bedside Books of Birds, and The Bedside Book of Beasts - was instrumental in forming the Writer's Union of Canada, and helped launch the Book and Periodical Development Council and the Writers' Development Trust. Graeme is a past president of PEN Canada and the recipient of both the Harbourfront Festival Prize and the Toronto Arts Award, and the Order of Canada. He has also been a council member of World Wildlife Fund Canada, and is chairman of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory.

This event is co-produced with TVO's Big Ideas, a weekly showcase of public intellectual culture on TVO Saturdas and Sundays at 5:30pm. Registration for this event begins March 2.

MODRIS EKSTEINS LUNCH + LEARN

April 23, 2012
12:00 - 1:30 pm
The Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

Join us for an intimate Lunch + Learn session with Modris Eksteins, award-winning author of Solar Dance, an exploration of our fascination with Vincent van Gogh. A dismal failure in his own century, van Gogh became the most popular – and expensive – artist of the 20th century largely due to obscure dancer turned art dealer, Otto Wacker. Through the lens of Wacker’s sensational 1932 trial in Berlin for selling fake van Goghs, Eksteins offers an unusual narrative of Weimar Germany, the rise of Hitler, and more broadly speaking, the replacement of the 19th-century certitude with 20th-century doubt.

$25 - Includes a bag lunch by Jamie Kennedy Kitchens.

Presented by the LRC in partnership with the Gardiner Museum.

May 2012

LRC PRESENTS...ANDREW COYNE
Post-Economic Politics in Canada

May 14, 2012
7:00 - 9:00 pm
The Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

An award-winning writer, Coyne has been national editor for Maclean's as well as columnist for the Globe and Mail, The Financial Post, and his work has appeared in numerous international publications. He is a columnist for The National Post. In Coyne's opinion, the state of the economy, contrary to popular belief, will not be the defining issue in our public policy debates.

This event is co-produced with TVO's Big Ideas, a weekly showcase of public intellectual culture on TVO Saturdas and Sundays at 5:30pm. Registration for this event begins April 14.

MOLLY PEACOCK LUNCH + LEARN

May 31, 2012
12:00 - 1:30 pm
The Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

Join us for an intimate Lunch + Learn session with Molly Peacock, author of the best-selling The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. In 1772, upon her second husband’s death, Mary Delany arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors and, at the age of seventy-two, invented a new art form, mixed-media collage. Over the next decade, Mrs. Delany created an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum. Peacock, a noted poet and memoirist, will share these floral images, connecting them to objects within the Gardiner collection, and discuss how the witty, talented, profound Delany took her craft into art.

$25 - Includes a bag lunch by Jamie Kennedy Kitchens.

Presented by the LRC in partnership with the Gardiner Museum.